Small businesses depend on their email more than ever, and too often when we’re introduced to a new client, we find considerable weaknesses in their email systems.
One of the best things we bring to our new SME (Small and medium-sized enterprise) clients is a kind of standardization of their email infrastructure– essentially introducing “commercial grade” systems to replace “consumer grade” systems.
In our experience, costs for these kinds of systems, specifically some flavour of “in-house” Microsoft Exchange server, would start at about the $5,000 mark for equipment, and would come with some requirement for oversight in the form of an I.T. employee or an expensive maintenance contract with a traditional I.T. company. And if your business needs any form of archival for it’s incoming and outgoing email, the costs increase greatly. If we estimated the cost of the I.T. oversight at $500 per month (which is uncommonly conservative), and the cost for an archival solution at $1,800 per year, that puts the 3 year amortized cost at about $25,000.
Our Rackspace Hosted Exchange Complete bundle, a truly “Best of Breed” solution, changes all that. For a 10 user small business, 3 year amortized costs would be about $5,400. But there are a bunch of things about this approach that make it even more remarkable:
- 1 Terabyte of Storage for mailboxes
- Worry free backup and redundancy
- Unparalleled availability (that is, you’ll never have to worry that your mail server is offline because your local internet provider is janky).
- No need to interact with a grumpy I.T. guy
And possibly one of the most compelling things is the ability to have complete insight into all the Intellectual Property assembled inside your email system. Every email message, replete with all the attachments– budget spreadsheets, customer quotes, legal documents, etceteras, all become easily searchable by anyone in your organization that needs that capability.
Contact us today to talk about making your email system serve you better.